Realizing Fault Resilience in Web-Server Cluster

Abstract

Today, a successful Internet service is absolutely critical to be up 100 percent of the time. Server clustering is the most promising approach to meet this requirement. However, the existing Web server-clustering solutions merely can provide high availability derived from its redundancy nature, but offer no guarantee about fault resilience for the service. In this paper, we address this problem by implementing an innovative mechanism that enables a Web request to be smoothly migrated and recovered on another working node in the presence of server failure. We will show that the request migration and recovery could be efficiently achieved in the manner of user transparency. The achieved capability of fault resilience is important and essential for a variety of critical services (e.g., E-commerce), which are increasingly widespread used. Our approach takes an important step toward providing a highly reliable Web service.